


Blood and wires

by wildmachinery



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-29
Updated: 2005-03-29
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildmachinery/pseuds/wildmachinery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ethnocentrism.  Post-ep for Double Jeopardy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood and wires

The longer Jack talked, the more obviously horrified Daniel got, visibly tensing, like a big coiled-up spring. And when he got like that, Jack knew, it only took a little push to get him to go boinging all over the place.

So he pushed. "Look," he said, "I don't understand why you're so upset about this."

"I can't understand why you're not! I mean, for all intents and purposes," and Daniel was so mad he was sputtering, "that was _us_. You just-"

"Hey," Jack snapped, because that was taking it a little far. "That was _not_ us. They were copies, that's all. Glorified xeroxes."

"How can you-" Daniel bit back whatever he'd been about to say. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "You just saw yourself die, Jack. No matter how you want to-"

"That was not me!" Jack half-yelled, and it was true, he was right, and this was just Daniel being annoyingly Daniel. He would sulk for a while, it would blow over, Fraiser would finally let them leave the base, and then they could get back to their regularly scheduled lives. Jack couldn't wait.

Daniel huffed out a short, angry breath, shot Jack a disgusted look that really just came out kind of cute, and stalked out of his office. There, Jack thought, leaning back in his chair, Phase One is underway.

* * *

Phase Two wasn't proceeding quite as smoothly as he'd planned. Instead, they were stuck at Phase One point Five, in which Daniel sulked while talking at him nonstop. Jack was building a spiraling stack of books on a low table in the corner of the office, while Daniel sat at his computer reading the mission report and lecturing almost distractedly.

"From everything you've said, it would seem that they possessed the cognitive and emotional faculties of biological humans," Daniel said, half to himself. "In any case, it certainly follows the basic Cartesian principle."

Jack looked up from his tower, and blinked at him.

Daniel sighed. "I think," he clarified, "therefore I am."

"I knew that," Jack muttered sullenly. Daniel carefully didn't roll his eyes and kept on talking about independent consciousness, peppering his sentences with random German, and Latin phrases that Jack only half-understood. That was the trouble with those damned time loops, Jack thought gravely, carefully adding a thick Campbell hardback to his tower. You had a lot more time to learn, but everything started to flow together after a while, and then you forgot it all twice as fast. The number of books was up to fourteen, and the structure was starting to wobble. Maybe he was just getting old. Jack assessed the situation, and nudged one corner of Book Nine. It steadied.

"... in one sense, they could even be considered our children."

Jack's pleased smirk vanished so quickly, it felt like someone had vacuumed it right off his face. "What?!" he choked. His hand hit the edge of a book, and the stack toppled every which way. Jack winced.

"Or our siblings," Daniel went on, oblivious, "or even near-identical reflections of ourselves. We've encountered similar things before, with the quantum mirror." That was _different_ , Jack thought helplessly. "Or I could just be completely over-complicating things."

"Heaven forfend," Jack replied, picking up the fallen books.

"I suppose it could really be the simplest explanation, that they're truly independent beings. And in that case, they-"

They're not, though, Jack thought, and stopped listening altogether. They couldn't be. That was what had made his copy so predictable; Jack had known what he'd been thinking because he had already been thinking the same thing. That didn't really explain why the robot-him was so annoying, though, so maybe Daniel was right on a few points.

"... always the possibility that their behavior is just an artificial reproduction of seemingly common personality traits, which in turn raises the question ..."

Whatever it was, it was making his head hurt to think about it this much. Daniel had his nose buried in a philosophy book and was burbling on almost happily about shared identifiers and divergent characteristics and what factors were necessary to truly constitute consciousness. He had that same slightly pleased, abstracted look that Carter got whenever she was wrestling with a particularly hairy physics problem, and Jack took the opportunity to make his escape.

It was about time all that Special Ops training came in handy, anyway.

* * *

"Why does the idea of them irritate you so much?"

Jack rubbed his eyes and looked up. Daniel was still standing there, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, and Jack wasn't sure how many times they could possibly talk about this in a forty-eight hour period. "Wasn't that door locked?" he asked.

Daniel just looked at him, curious and clinical, and waggled his eyebrows in an encouraging manner. Jack sighed. "I don't know, Daniel. It just does." The idea had been a real irritation, constant and physical, ever since Harlan had stepped through the gate. It had been the knowing, mostly; the knowing, again, that there was something out there so like him that it was a little hard to tell the difference between them. Maybe he'd just been hoping that he was a little too complicated for that, for his reproduction to have been that easy and complete.

 _Our Daniel is dead_ , and the whole thing had played all sorts of hell with his perception, and so he'd fought when maybe he should have offered sympathy.

Not that he would have accepted it anyway, if it had been him, but he'd heard somewhere that it was the thought that counted.

That was complete bullshit, of course.

His head was starting to hurt again. He frowned. Daniel was still there. "Run along now," Jack told him with a wave of his hand. "Go ... translate something."

Daniel blinked at him, disappointed, and actually walked out without arguing. Jack found himself staring out the door, long after he'd gone.

The other him ... hadn't been him, hadn't even been a person really, but it still bothered Jack more than he cared to admit to know that he was dead. _I know you better than that_ , said a whisper in his head, in his own voice, and maybe he had, but it didn't mean that Jack had to like it.

Blood or wires, Jack thought. You can't have both.

He shook his head, and went back to his work.

* * *

"I wasn't," Daniel said. He gazed distractedly at Jack's left elbow, and bit his lip, and said again, "I wasn't thinking about it in the right context."

Jack sat across from him, decidedly not eating a glass of commissary jello. It was a bright, poisonous green, and they'd slopped whipped cream over the top of it. "Okay," he drawled. He hated whipped cream on jello.

Daniel didn't say anything, just folded his arms on the table and put his head down. He mumbled briefly to himself - 'ethnocentric', Jack heard, and right after that, 'stupid' - then fell quiet, and didn't move.

Jack looked at him, something in his chest tightening oddly, and it was far too easy for him to picture Teal'c vanished away by zat fire, Carter hit in the back by an energy blast, bleeding and burned. Daniel with his head blown off, and he could picture it so clearly because it should have happened already, a hundred times over. Shot, asphyxiated, blown up, poisoned, explosively decompressed, messily eaten by weird gooey alien hippos, but their luck had been so unnaturally good all these years. Maybe that was why everyone around them kept getting more than their fair share of bad luck; someone had to pick up the slack. It was practically a law of nature; hang around with SG-1 too much, and watch your life expectancy get progressively shorter.

It could have happened to them, and it should have, and Jack had just seen first-hand what it would be like, in glorious full-screen Technicolor. It had been far too easy, and Jack wasn't sure whether he wanted to forget it or not.

He stabbed at the jello, leaving his spoon sticking straight up. The green stuff quivered wretchedly for a moment, whipped cream melting into the silverware-inflicted crevice, and stilled. It was strangely satisfying.

Daniel raised his head a little then, and looked up at Jack through his lashes. "I don't know why I made it so complicated."

Jack scrubbed at his forehead. "I don't really get it. It still feels a little like some kind of object lesson, you know?" All he really wanted, at that moment, was to go home, have a few beers, and try to balance out all this weirdness. He glanced at his watch. Thirteen hours to go. Fuck.

"They were people, Jack," Daniel said, a little reprovingly, "not metaphors." He sounded very tired.

Blood and wires. Jack sighed, and closed his eyes. "Yeah."

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at [sg1_flashfic](http://community.livejournal.com/sg1_flashfic/1229.html).


End file.
